With the widespread use of the Internet and its associated technologies, enterprises have to evolve in the way they are conducting business. 'e-business applications' refer to a new class of distributed applications that involves the Internet as a communication platform. Each e-business application supports the full automation of business processes that can span across multiple enterprises. For a given application domain that involves e-business application development, a number of design decisions that best fullfil stakeholders requirements have to be made. One important issue is the reuse of functionality which exists within legacy systems that can belong to one or more enterprises within the same domain. Most existing design approaches are inadequate in supporting the exploration of all design combinations. Moreover, there is little work on how to identify the best design decisions systematically for a given application domain. In this thesis we present a pattern-based approach that addresses the architectural design of e-business applications. We identify a number of architectural patterns whose instantiation on a given design problem correspond to different architectural design alternatives. We also identify models that enable the estimation of quality attributes for such alternatives. Then we investigate and utilise methods to select the best pattern for a given design problem. We also describe the process of generating the alternative architectures, estimating their qualities, and then ranking them with respect to any quality attribute or a combination of quality attributes. We validate this approach on a real life case study in the area of capital markets. The case study concerns realistic e-business applications that rely on existing legacy applications. The validation exercise has produced predictions which have been compared with actual design decisions that have been made. The thesis also proposes a framework for the systematic identification of architectural patterns. An additional set of architectural patterns and their impact on the case study are discussed. The main contribution of this thesis is in the identification of patterns and quality attributes models for the architectural design of e-business applications that aid in the systematic selection of the most appropriate architectural pattern for a given problem context.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/187974 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Dabous, Feras Taleb Abdel Rahman, School of Information Systems Technology & Management, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Information Systems Technology and Management |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Feras Taleb Abdel Rahman Dabous, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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